+30% Enhanced GameDev

KREEP, apples and penguins.

Haven’t written for months now about Operation KREEP. It is time to revisit this old buddy bud bud of mine!

Yes, as the title suggest, it is cross-platform time 😉 …

Not official, but soon…

Nope, sadly no official release yet 😦 , but the Linux build is ready and tested (at least on my Nix machines) and the MAC build is ready for testing too. This means, that in a week or two an official release can happen, although a little piece of the puzzle is missing.

I require additional pylons!

I have two PCs, so I tested the Linux version of the game on two Ubuntu versions, but more would be nice (zillion distros 😦 ) + I HAVE NO MAC MACHINE 😦 …

This means, that the MAC build essentially never ever been started! I would really love to release the cross-platform builds, players already asked for them, but without sufficient testing it is not going to happen. Buying a MAC would be a somewhat logical investment at this point, but Operation KREEP (and my whole game development venture for that matter) is on an extremely tight budget as it is not profitable so far, so I will try to postpone that a little.

Feedback, results, “compensation”

Based on the differences between the builds (almost 0 code change, only packaging varies), I think a few simple checks would suffice. Whether installation works (files copied, icons set etc…), whether the game starts and basic configuration settings checks (settings work and are saved to correct application data folders) + a short test play round just for fun 😉 .

I know it is shady to ask for free QA for a product, but this is the reality of the situation I’m in 😐 . If you would like to help out I thought about sharing a limited amount of Steam/itch.io/IndieGameStand keys for the full game as a “payment”.

If you dislike sharing any personal information, but still would like to help out, please simply post results as comments here or contact me by e-mail: spidi@magicitemtech.com

I guess contact info of a cheap&used MAC reseller in Hungary could help too if you know any 🙂 .

Demo builds

Porting tech stuff

Just a little tech talk as closing words. The windows version of the game was made in C# using XNA. Two really cool projects were born to both preserve and enhance XNA in the last few years. MonoGame and FNA. Both are great and well established/tested at this point, but I choose FNA for porting Operation KREEP to Linux and MAC. My reasoning was the following:

Around a year or two ago when I was using MonoGame to work on my Linux machines I encountered some difficulties. MonoGame on Nix platform was using OpenTK for window, input and OpenGL context management and as I know, that library had it’s fair share of bugs and there was no real support/contribution/fixes for it for a long while.

Remark: as I know the MonoGame team changed to SDL2 lately, the same library FNA uses under the hood so it is probably not the case by now.

MonoGame favors a per-platform build approach, which looking at all the possible target platforms (desktop, mobile, consoles) is a logical choice, but requires managing and building multiple executables for each target. FNA from the get go approached this with a common desktop runtime, so one build works on all major desktop platforms (only packaging has to be taken care of per target).
Remark: if I’m not mistaken, last year a “common desktop” build was introduced for MonoGame too, so technically it could work the same way as FNA for desktop.

The FNA developer Ethan Lee had laser focus on cross-platform desktop XNA development and delivery, and the wiki for FNA had a really nice documentation about both working with FNA (differences and extras compared to XNA) and packaging + delivering games using it for Windows, MAC OS X and Linux. This documentation seemed really helpful and complete.

All in all I suspect both libraries could work perfectly for publishing your games to the three major desktop platforms, but I wanted to give FNA a try too. I was pleasantly surprised, most things worked like a snap without much fiddling.

That is it for today, in a few days I’ll post a new video & blog entry for I am overburdened. If you decide to help MUCH LOVE, SUCH WOW 🙂 and thanks awfully!